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% Description: Serbian Word Order: The Sequel
% Author:      "Rodriguez-Herrera, German" <german.rodriguez.herrera@gmail.com>
% History:     27th Jan 2010 - first version
%              28th Jan 2010 - German changed to Herman in Cyrillic
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\title{On \emph{the} function\\
of word order in English and Serbian\\
\emph{--- the sequel ---}}


\author{German Rodriguez and the -i{\'c} family\\
\small{\texttt{german.rodriguez.herrera@gmail.com}}}
\date{January 27, 2010}
\maketitle

\begin{abstract}

Slobodanka Kiti\'c has studied along with some of her predecessors in the field
of Linguistics, such as Mihajlov Stevanovi\'c or Milivoje Minovi\'c, the
characteristics and particularities of the grammar of the always astonishing
Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Montenegrin languages, both in the latin and in
the old, new, and yet constantly growing%
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} cyrillic script.

These authors have also analyzed even the tiniest differences that separate the
well-known English from the exotic, challenging, and playful Serbian. 

Two features of the Serbian language do not cease to strike the novice: the
lack of articles and the word-order freedom. This features are surprisingly
striking, in the sense that the two together \emph{strike} the newcomers in a
\emph{surprising} manner, as Latin was compulsory in the secondary school for many of
the surprised ones --- Latin, a language with \emph{almost absolutely free}
word order, tied to the fact of also being a synthetic declined language;
just exactly as Serbian is.

In this small piece of work we further investigate on the issue of word
order freedom in Serbian and arrive to a new discovery on its constraints
that will hopefully be of use to the researchers of this interesting topic.

\end{abstract}

\section{Introduction, Related Work, Discovery, Results, Conclusions and Future Work}

The difference in word order between English and Serbian has been studied in
detail and the conclusion is that even if the word order in Serbian is
\emph{freer} than in English, that does not mean that the word order in Serbian
is \emph{absolutely} free~\cite{Minovic87,Stevanovic86}.  That \emph{the word
order is free} refers to the possibility for each \emph{sentence unit} in a sentence
(except some well defined cases) to occupy any position within the language
unit without altering the meaning.

When questioned about the nature and use of the word order freedom of Serbian,
some native speakers reply that ``it depends on the mood''. Scientific
research~\cite{Kitic02} backs up that claim, but it is expressed in more
precise but also less clear for the unversed, namely, that word order freedom
are more the means of \emph{pragmatic and stylistic} values rather than the
means of \emph{syntactic} value. 

In her wonderful work, Kiti\'c~\cite{Kitic02} delves into the question of how
free is the word order in Serbian. She did an incredible amount of very hard,
tedious work, that probably helped her achieve the Zen state, by choosing a
corpus of seemingly innocent sentences and making all the possible combinations
of word orders that were possible in both the original English or Serbian, and
in (possibly multiple of which only one was selected) their translations.

However, Kiti\'c left, maybe intentionally, so that someone could, someday like
today give her a tribute to her earliest works, an even more shocking discovery:
across the word orders presented, none is an exact reverse word order of some
other. Except for the most trivial cases (only few words), for which the
fight for freedom of movement of the Serbian language wins over this simple 
non-reversible property, the latter seems to hold true.

The discovery is useful because it rules out a lot of possibilities (all the
reverses) soon enough from consideration, reducing the amount of work of the
dedicated people like Kiti\'c, giving them some amount of precious free time to
enjoy with their families or write even more nice works (like
probably~\cite{Kitic98a}\cite{Kitic98b}, which I could not find in Internet).

In the future it would be nice to explore not only the word order acquisition
of Serbian speakers learning English as a foreign language, but also of
Serbian speakers learning Spanish. It would be of the most interest to map
declinations into articles, and vice versa, so that Spanish, English, and
Serbian speakers together can understand each other better and build a
better world.

\section{Original example given by Slobodanka Kiti\'c}

\begin{quote}
Consider the following example.

\begin{quote}
\begin{itemize}
\item[-] My mother usually enjoys parties very much. (SAVOA)
\item[-] Usually my mother enjoys parties very much. (ASVOA)
\item[-] My mother enjoys parties very much, usually. (SVOAA)

\hfill\cite{Quirk91}
\end{itemize}
\end{quote}


The above sentence can have many Serbian equivalents. Here follow some of the possibilities:

\begin{itemize}
\item[-] Moja majka obi{\v c}no mnogo u{\v z}iva u zabavama. (SAAVO)
\item[-] Moja majka mnogo u{\v z}iva u zabavama, obi{\v c}no. (SAVOA)
\item[-] Moja majka u zabavama obi{\v c}no mnogo u{\v z}iva. (SOAAV)
\item[-] Obi{\v c}no moja majka mnogo u{\v z}iva u zabavama. (ASAVO)
\item[-] Obi{\v c}no u zabavama mnogo u{\v z}iva moja majka. (AOAVS)
\item[-] Obi{\v c}no mnogo u{\v z}iva u zabavama moja majka. (AAVOS)
\item[-] U zabavama obi{\v c}no mnogo u{\v z}iva moja majka. (OAAVS)
\item[-] U zabavama obi{\v c}no moja majka mnogo u{\v z}iva. (OASAV)
\item[-] U zabavama moja majka obi{\v c}no mnogo u{\v z}iva. (OSAAV)
\item[-] Mnogo u{\v z}iva, obi{\v c}no, u zabavama moja majka. (AVAOS)
\item[-] Mnogo u{\v z}iva moja majka u zabavama obi{\v c}no. (AVSOA)
\end{itemize}

\hfill\cite{Kitic02}
\end{quote}

\section{Acknowledgments}
I would like to thank \emph{Google}, that found Kiti\'c's article for me,
the -i\'c family for giving me linguistic support, both technical and
friendly, and also to my advisors and my thesis, whose pressure I can
only release by writing nonsense.

%%% START: if Cyrillic
\vspace{1em} % This adds "vertical scpace" of a big "M".
             % \hfill will fill with spaces until justification to the right
\hfill\textcyr{Herman Rodriges Erera}\footnote{The Cyrillic reflects
(approximately) the way my name is pronounced in Spanish. Please feel 
free to send me any comments, corrections and suggestions.}
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